Nate Silver Predicts a ‘Momentous’ Midterm

“If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era,” Nate Silver told me.

The midterms are a week away, and it looks entirely possible that Democrats will win not just the House, but also the Senate. Democrats are polling competitively deep into red territory – Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, Kansas – states that Trump won in 2024 by double digits.

But Democrats have been burned by big polling misses before. So can we really trust what the polls are telling us? And what stories have emerged in the data that we might see play out on election night?

Silver is an internationally famous elections nerd, one of the people who made election forecasting a core part of American political discourse. He edits The Silver Bulletin on Substack, co-hosts the podcast “Still Counting” and is the author, most recently, of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.”

Mentioned:

“Data centres are turning Trump voters into Democrats” by The Economist

“We Gave Four Good Pollsters the Same Raw Data. They Had Four Different Results.” by Nate Cohn

“FINAL Silver Bulletin 2024 presidential election forecast” by Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson

Book Recommendations:

The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon

You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall, with Sasha Chapin

The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Jack McCordick. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair, Julie Beer and Jordyn Flaherty. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Cinematography by Bets Wilkins. Video editing by Arpita Aneja, Mahdokht Mahmoudabadi and Brandon Belk-Yee. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cascione, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Rollin Hu, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.

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